LLNL Takes Lead in Managing the DOE’s FastForward Program

In March 2012, the U.S. Department of Energy informed the folks at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory they had been selected to run the FastForward program. To learn more, Mike Bernhardt at The Exascale Report caught up with LLNL’s Terri Quinn, Principal Deputy Department Head, Integrated Computing and Communications.

What I think is really incredible is the opportunity these companies are giving us to actually influence technology. They had a lot of innovative ideas in the proposals, all of which were very high quality, but additionally, they are very open to having us contribute at a really in depth level. We’ve been able to do this in pieces before, but to this extent, I think it is really an extraordinary opportunity for us – to not just influence one line of computers, like the Blue Gene line for example, where we’ve done co-design with those folks for the past eight years, but in this case, we can have some influence on IBM, Intel, NVIDIA and AMD. It was actually surprising as to how open the companies were about doing this and how willing they were to jump in and work with us on co-design.

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